


i'm gonna keep you in love with me (for a while)

by asexualizing (Specialcookies)



Category: Ocean's 8 (2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Fusion, Angst, F/F, Memory Loss, Nostalgia, Sad with a Happy Ending
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-18
Updated: 2019-01-27
Packaged: 2019-10-12 07:11:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17462960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Specialcookies/pseuds/asexualizing
Summary: Is there anything to say when after five years, eight months, and twelve days, Debbie returns to a partner who had decided to erase any trace of Debbie from her life—any trace of Debbie from her memory, any trace of more than two decades of them?Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind AU. While Debbie was in prison, Lou decided to erase her from her memory. Now, before Debbie steals the Toussaint, she needs to figure out what to do about that.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> hopefully updates will be semi-regular since chapters are planned to be short, but also i am working on too many fics simultaneously so i am sorry if they take a while.

"She doesn't remember a thing."

The words are pulled tight out of her chest, through a throat that is burning, through lips that almost refuse to move; her hands fiddle with the string of her teabag, her eyes glued to the swirling of the murky water—Debbie can't think of anything that ever felt as daunting as Lou saying her name as if she never heard it before. _Debbie Ocean_. Just another pretty girl, now.

"She doesn't remember me."

Tammy's quiet for far too long. But really, is there anything to say when after five years, eight months, and twelve days, Debbie returns to a partner who had decided to erase any trace of Debbie from her life—any trace of Debbie from her memory, any trace of more than two decades of them?

There's just nothing—nothing Debbie can do, and nothing Tammy can say, and nothing that Lou remembers, and yet Debbie grows more irritated the longer the silence goes on.

She looks up at Tammy, who is staring at her, blinking, trying to form words that are impossible to form, and drinks her tea. _Tell me anything_ , she thinks, because all Debbie wants to hear right now is the sound of a person who knows who she is to them.

"How did you find out?" Tammy finally asks, small and careful and uncomprehending.

"Honestly? I knew the moment she looked at me. She just…she did that thing she does whenever there's a woman she finds attractive. You know, with the right curve of the lip, and the right tilt of the head, and the hip and I just—"

Debbie inhales. Hates it when she wavers, hates the uncertainty that's tainting her right now. It's funny, really, the rest of it all. Should be funny. Would have been funny if Lou were playing a joke on her. But she wasn't.

"She said the same exact words she'd used the first time we met."

"And you're sure she isn't just…" Tammy trails off. Debbie can hear that she doesn't believe that possibility herself, knows Lou all to well to think that seeing Debbie after five years, eight months, and twelve days would be an opportunity for her to mess around.

" _Hello, beautiful_ ," Debbie repeats Lou's greeting to her. "Except this time, I didn't have my hand down her pocket, and she didn't have her fingers around my wrist."

Tammy laughs, the same way Debbie wishes she could—a bitter, ironic thing. "Well, she always had her way with women."

It's true. Lou's a charmer—wasn't born one but has learned to be the version of herself that could get around the world as easily as possible. It's not a farce, but it is an exaggeration of a single side of her, and after two decades, Debbie has gotten used to knowing all sides. Lou surveying her like she was just _interested_ , pushing herself off the wall she's been leaning against to take two beautiful strides towards Debbie, flicking her lighter on and off while saying, _Hello, Beautiful_ —Debbie could barely keep the bile from coming up. It wasn't hard to know that something is wrong because Lou, _her_ Lou, has been molded to fit through the absences in Debbie, just like Debbie has been molded to fit through the absences in her; but _this_ Lou was sharp edges that cut like jigsaw at the interstices where Debbie used to have something. 

"She doesn't remember me," Debbie says again, can't stop herself, because it's too loud in her head and she can't keep it inside.

She's come to Tammy because the music at Lou's club was making her dizzy, and Lou—owning a club that runs legit except for the corners she cuts and the vodka that is full of water, and _yes_ , Debbie's not an idiot, she can taste that—was making her dizzy, and Tammy's always been a safe bet. Tammy's always _been there_ , ever since college, trustworthy is a way that a con should never be, but it works like magic for Tammy. Suburban life would seem to fit her like a glove if Debbie wouldn't have known that she runs bored easier than even herself.

 _You look like you could use another drink,_ Lou said, taking Debbie's empty glass off her hands and leading her to the bar. Winking as she took down a crystal skull and made Debbie a heavily dry, heavenly Martini. Debbie needed half of the top shelf, right about then.

_You still tend as an owner?_

_For some._

Tammy's face fall, not pity on them but a terrified expression, something deeply disturbed. "What did you do?" she asks.

"I—" _I stayed because I couldn't walk away, and I let her flirt with me because at least it was something, and I watched her smile because it was everything I missed._ "I talked to her for a bit, just…to see what happens, you know? But nothing happened. She flirted with me. Left her number in my pocket."

"Shit, Deb."

"Yeah."

They fall quiet once again. Debbie shuts her eyes, lets the steaming tea heat her face. Her breath is loud in her ears, a mechanical thing she feels like she shouldn't be doing. More than two decades. She never thought Lou would be the kind of person to just want to lose that.

"Are you going to call her?"

"I don't know."

"Are you going to…well, you did plan something, didn't you?"

"Of course I did."

"Are you going along with it?"

She pauses, chews at her bottom lip. She should. There's practically nothing she can do to get Lou on board now, not the way she needs her, and the plan can be worked out, can't it? She must revise. She can get it right. She can just go on, make a whole lot of money and have no one to share the satisfaction with.

"I don't know."

Tammy sighs. Her feet rustle over the carpeted floor and soon enough a hand rakes through Debbie's hair. "You can stay here for a few days, then I can get you an apartment."

Debbie manages to smile at that. "Thought you weren't doing that anymore."

"Well, for you." Tammy may try to pretend conning is a hardship however much she likes, but Debbie knows her.

She leans into Tammy's touch, a comfort she couldn't possibly ask for but appreciates all the same; feels too small, too much, too detached from herself to truly be a person, right now. "You think I can get her to remember?"

"I don't know much about that process, Deb."

"I need to call Amita."

"Yeah."

They let the air hang heavy then. Debbie knows it's far too late for Tammy to stay like this with her, but Tammy does, and Debbie couldn't possibly ask her to leave. She has to figure this out. Can't do anything else before she figures this out.

 _You don't know who I am,_ she stated at Lou, tried to keep at least an air of confidence, and she still isn't sure if she's succeeded, or if Lou simply couldn't put her finger on what was wrong with that, and why she was supposed to know Debbie.

 _We can change that,_ Lou replied with the right curve of her lips, and the right tilt of her head, and her eyes surveying Debbie slowly as if she didn't want to forget the way she looked.

"Let's go to sleep, Tim-Tam," she murmurs, can feel Tammy's body growing heavy with fatigue.

A bed is a good a place as any to think.

*

 **First** **thing's first**

_Talk to Amita. She's spent two years working for that company, she'll know more about the process than anyone else you know can._

Debbie's set her phone screen to the brightest setting, googled "Lacuna, Inc." and is now scrolling through their website, trying to gather information from the vague explanations they offer about their services. _More information will be given in person, meetings can be set up through the online form or our number…_

There was a time in her life when Amita had wanted to abandon all ties to her family, had had enough of their pestering and quit the jewelry shop to go start her own thing. Debbie didn't know her back then; Danny had only introduced them when Debbie and Lou had landed their hands on some gemstones that needed to be liquified and that was way past her rebellious stage. But the story did come up in various conversations they had over cheap wine—Lou's hand wrapped around Debbie's waist and Amita telling them that she sometimes feel it is impossible for her to believe in the sustainability of human interaction after seeing all these people come to forget.

 _You have to take your chances,_ Lou would say any time, not looking at Debbie but running her fingers over her skin. _Sometimes it's worth it._

_Sometimes,_ Debbie would stretch, a smile dancing on her lips.

Her head is starting to pound from the hours she's spent looking at her phone, but she keeps scrolling, reading what she's already read over and over again, numb and unable to stop.

Lou asked her, once. Asked if Debbie would ever try to forget something, someone—her father, an ex, a con gone wrong. Would ever want a memory deleted. _I don't want people messing with my head_ , she told her, ran a finger over Lou's chest. _I do like your head,_ Lou replied.

They didn't talk about that again.

So **first thing's first** , understand. Then, decide. Then, act.

 ~~And don't call Lou.~~ And call Lou. You have to keep in touch.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I watched Eternal Sunshine a very long time ago so I might have gone a bit rogue with the memory extraction technology and shit but, well, this is what I needed for the purposes of this fic. Enjoy!

Daniel Ocean was never a man of _good_ advice, but a man of the only kind of advice that Debbie could ever bear taking. Unfortunately, Daniel Ocean was also a man living reckless, stupid, unbelievably shitty life, which has possibly led to him lying in the family mausoleum at his fifties—even earlier than their father—or to him faking his own death and disappearing. Whatever the case is, Debbie's now talking to a grave instead of to her brother.

"I know what you would tell me to do if you were here, but I also know what you would have done yourself, so I must ask you to get off your high fucking horse this time and just let me be as insolent as you."

She doesn't expect an answer, which is, admittedly, better than a fight with Danny. Still, something in her chest caves as the silence stretches, and she can hear his voice in her head telling her to not be him. Sometimes she thought he meant that she _couldn't_ be him, couldn't be a proper Ocean, and sometimes she thought she was imagining things. Sometimes she thought he wanted the name all to himself—and sometimes, well, sometimes she thought he was trying to make her a better person than he could ever be.

Reuben is definitely shuffling his feet like the worst con man to ever walk this earth around the corner of this familial mass grave, and any other day, Debbie would have been pissed. Danny tended to use his men to keep an eye on her when he thought she couldn't handle things alone—that's been the root for all the worst fights they ever had. Debbie never wanted him to obsessively watch over her—she just wanted him to fucking be there if she needed. Like right now.

_God, I could really use your idiot brain right now._

"Come on out, Reuben," she sighs. Reuben steps hesitantly towards her, smiles an apologetic smile because he was never one to fully support Danny's schemes, reaches out to rub her shoulder. Debbie smiles, tired and terse and a bit relieved—Reuben was a better uncle than any other uncle she'd ever had. There's a saving grace to grant him, for sure. "What are you doing here?"

"Paying my respects."

"That's some coincidence."

With a deep sigh Reuben rubs her shoulder, then lets his hand drop, his expression falling. "Originally, I had a different message to deliver you."

"Oh, did you?" Debbie asks, chin up and starting to regret this.

"But we've heard there's a slight hitch to your plan."

"So Danny told you the plan?"

"No. Just to tell you not to do it."

Scoffing, Debbie shakes her head and turns to walk, slowly enough for Reuben to fall into step by her.

"He cared. He cared that you won't lose anything more than what you've already lost."

"High fucking horse," she murmurs under her breath, picking up step. She knows what Reuben will say in just a few moments.

"Look, Deborah. We've done some research. There isn't a way to implement the memories back."

"I know."

"And you still seem like you are about to do something."

"I am."

"Why did you come?"

Reuben stops in his track, and for some goddamn reason, Debbie does, too; turns around to face him and glare.

"Because I miss my brother."

"Deborah."

She groans, pushes her hands into her coat pockets. "Because I needed him to tell me that I won't fuck it up even more."

"You know what he'd say."

"That I can't know that."

"And you know what he'd do."

"He'd do it anyway."

Debbie softens, watches a rueful smile washing over Reuben's face. They will at least forever have that mutual understanding.

"I gotta go," she says, steps closer to Reuben so she can plant a kiss to his cheek. "You're looking sharp."

His smile grows. "You know we've got your back if you need us."

Debbie nods. Turns her back to him and walks, takes a deep breath and straightens her back.

*

"There are a few things you have to understand about memories, before I even explain the process to you," Amita said, prompted Debbie to take out her notepad and start writing. Now Debbie reads over her notes, trying to make sense of it all and utterly failing.

_"Thing is, there's much more to memories than their physical location, which is what we can define at Lacuna. Scents, numbers, places, physical sensations, sights—these are all things memories can be tangled in. Other memories, as well. It's all very convoluted. And as a company, Lacuna does not have the technology to untangle all this shit. What they can do is reach the physical location of a specific memory and extract it, but they can not uproot it completely from the mind of a given person. So, say, for example, someone deletes memories of an ex. They are not going to remember the person, they are not going to remember specific events, etcetera, but they **are** going to be left with these traces—this inexplicable connection to someone, these sensations that make no sense to them when they encounter certain scents or places or numbers and whatever they have in their brain that in connected, conceptually, to that person. You said Lou treated you like you were someone special—that must be it. She has no actual recollection of you, but she does, on some deep, unreachable, unconscious level, remember you."_

_"Are you saying I can undo this?"_

_"No. Unfortunately, no. You have no way of putting her memories of you back in place. I'm just saying, whatever you were to her, it's not completely gone. She will always have a special place for you in her…heart, I guess."_

Debbie shuts her eyes, swallows the lump that is forming in her throat as she reads those words again. She cannot grasp it. She cannot fathom a world in which Lou doesn’t _know_ her—inside out, upside down, better than the inside of her own palm; cannot fathom a reality in which she is something _new_ to Lou. And yet, there's a deeply logical conclusion to what Amita was saying—there's nothing that can truly separate her and Lou. There's nothing that can truly make them strangers, insignificant, random. They will always, always, always have more than two decades of relations to their name—there is nothing that can change that, not emotionally. It was a slight comfort that she held onto before she asked Amita:

_"And how does it work, exactly? The extraction?"_

_"Well, you're unconscious while they do it. Like, kind of under anesthesia. They have to go backwards. I mean, they start at the latest memory connected to what the person wants to erase and go back to the earliest memory. That's what makes most people regret their decision—they experience extreme sadness, but then they experience the height of, say, their relationship, and they want to remember that. Unfortunately, you can't stop the process in the middle. Not really. They haven't had any incidents like that in a long while."_

_"What do they do with the extracted memories?"_

_"They've come a long way along the years, but they still need to store the physical memories somewhere. It's the cloud generation. The wireless connections, the instantly sharable content, you know. It used to be on tapes, CDs, etcetera. Now it's on some storage space the company had purchased and secured to the best of their abilities. They had an incident, once, of an employee breaching contract and sharing that information with previous clients. But that was in the old days, when things were still on physical tapes. You'd have to have a very high clearance to reach this shit nowadays. Or, possibly, employ a hacker."_

_"And what happens to people who watch their own memories played to them?"_

_"To be completely honest with you, Deb, I have no idea. And I know you don't care about doing illegal things, but I gotta say, forcing someone to remember what they wanted to forget would be pretty goddamn unethical in the worst way possible, in my book."_

Throughout her whole life, Debbie has gone by some very strict ethical rules that her family has come up with. These were her only moral compass in a world full of illegal, unethical, questionable actions. But no one has ever written a rule to guide her though this situation.

There is a very clear plan ahead of her, concerning what Amita told her, and she is more than capable of executing it. It seems like nothing compared to the plan she has planned for five years, eight months, and twelve days.

Yet, Debbie chews on the pencil she has put between her teeth, and has no idea, still, if she can do that. If she can get the physical memories and give them back to Lou and find out what happens then. She has no idea what might happen then, and Debbie hates executing plans without knowing their final result.

Hates that she cannot anticipate Lou's moves now like more than two decades had taught her to.

Hates that there is no certainty around making Lou know what she should know.

Hates that she is considering letting Lou go.

Hates that she is considering never letting Lou go.

Tammy said it's only a couple of more days until she can settle in her new apartment, and Debbie has been planning on calling Rusty for two days now without actually doing it. She has a clear path and clear possibilities and still, she doesn't _know_. Cannot know, until she does one specific thing.

Will spend her life wondering, if she doesn't do it.

She might not know _this_ Lou, but she still knows herself, and she still knows _Lou_.

Her cell phone vibrates on the table next to her, and smiling—can't help but to—Debbie unlocks it and reads the single message on the screen:

_Wasn't sure you'd go for it._

_Who said I'm going for it?_

_I don't like it when women text me and then play the hard to get card._

_And I don't like it when people think that they can buy me with some fancy vodka and a wink._

_Feisty._

_Cocky._

_Why'd you text me?_

_Would have been rude not to._

_Rude, eh?_

_Don't like being rude._

_What do you like, then?_

_How about some lunch and a proper conversation?_

_I don't do dating._

_I didn't say it was a date._

_Then what would you say it is?_

_A lunch and a proper conversation._

_Feisty yet again._

_Say yes or no._

_Name a time and place._


End file.
